National Library of the Netherlands and BioMed Central agree to open access archive

Jan Velterop, Director and Publisher of BioMed Central, and Wim van Drimmelen, Director General of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), the National Library of the Netherlands, today signed an agreement to secure the long-term digital archiving of all research published by BioMed Central. The KB will act as an official archival agent for BioMed Central. As well as archiving all of the publisher's research articles, the KB has committed to updating the archive as technology changes. This will preserve the articles as a usable resource and ensure open access in perpetuity.

Wim van Drimmelen underlines the importance of this agreement: "Long-term preservation is part of the mission of the KB and features among our main strategic goals. Unlike printed publications, digital publications require from the publisher an active part in the archiving. Therefore arrangements with publishers are essential to realise the safe-keeping of the intellectual output of scientists."

BioMed Central's rapidly growing collection, currently 100 journals and more than 2500 articles, will sit alongside material from the two-largest STM publishers worldwide. All of the research BioMed Central deposits will be freely available, in keeping with the publisher's open access policy, both to walk-in visitors to the KB and via the library's website (www.kb.nl).

Jan Velterop explains what makes the BioMed Central archive at the KB so important: "Open Access authors want reassurance that their work will be freely available in the future. The KB deal delivers such assurances. This is the first sizeable quantity of fully open access research articles to be archived by the KB, which means that that part of the library's archive can be fully open to anyone who cares to seek access."Should the BioMed Central website be inoperable for a long period of time, for example in the case of a disaster, the KB would be part of the interim service system. In the unlikely event that BioMed Central or a successor should be forced by circumstance to cease to make these journals available, as an official archive the KB would continue to keep them accessible to all indefinitely, maintaining the open access promise.This agreement is part of a concerted effort by BioMed Central to provide its authors and readers with a solid and secure long-time archiving solution for electronic publications.

17 september 2003

Koninklijke Bibliotheek - National Library of the Netherlands http://www.kb.nl/kb/resources/frameset_kb.html?/kb/pr/pers/pers2003/kb-biomed-en.html